


Palm Trees Drawn in Sharp Ink

by LittleMousling



Category: Crooked Media RPF
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-02
Updated: 2018-11-02
Packaged: 2019-08-07 04:34:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16401398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleMousling/pseuds/LittleMousling
Summary: Lovett isn't going to let his tattoos make decisions for him anymore.





	Palm Trees Drawn in Sharp Ink

**Author's Note:**

  * For [retweet_this](https://archiveofourown.org/users/retweet_this/gifts).
  * Inspired by [distracted by the signs](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12417987) by [retweet_this](https://archiveofourown.org/users/retweet_this/pseuds/retweet_this). 



> My favourite aspect of the original story, besides the worldbuilding concept, was the ease with which the author navigated the OT3, placing the lightning bolt representing Jon's love for Lovett right up against the dog representing his love for Emily.
> 
> Because of the other canon changes, I’ve adjusted the Pundit timeline to assume Lovett got her as a puppy early in 2016, rather than as a young adult shortly before the election.

Lovett’s tattoos only ever screw up his life.

His first tattoo was the most terrifying: just **_gay_** on the inside of one bicep. It had come when he was sixteen, when he already knew, but no one else did. He’d worn long sleeves into the heat of summer, but when September rolled around, there was no escaping the locker room. He’d comforted himself that they’d already been calling him gay for years, that he’d never really been hidden, but—it was supposed to be his. It was supposed to belong to him.

It faded before he told his parents, replaced with the faint outline of a door. Lovett was unimpressed with his skin’s talent for metaphor, but it was at least easier to explain away. “I’m just a very private person. Keep things locked up. You know how it is,” Lovett said, on occasions that he had to say anything.

Briefly, around the end of college, it was a blaring, neon **_QUEER AS IN FUCK YOU_** , and Lovett wore the shortest sleeves he could find and took to lacing his fingers together behind his head whenever he was sitting still for more than ten seconds.

“Didn’t that used to be a door?” Spencer asked him, once, and then, “Oh. Huh. That’s kind of cool. Mine don’t change like that.”

“That one you had about ska went away, though,” Lovett points out.

“Okay, let’s not get into embarrassing teenage tattoos,” Spencer says. “That’s different. We’re adults now. More or less.”

More or less. It feels like a lot less in New York, when Lovett is on the verge of trying to make the leap from open mics to something more. When Lovett wakes up and wanders into the bathroom to see **_failure_** across his collarbone.

He throws his toothbrush holder at the mirror hard enough to break both, porcelain and glass shards jumbled in the sink, but he quits doing standup. The tattoos have always been right before.

***

Lovett’s tattoo of the White House, appearing in late ’07 while the campaign was gearing up for early primaries, was taken by the whole Hillary staff as proof of their certain victory.

“We’re shoo-ins,” staff said around him. “Lovett’s the sign.” Hillary and most of the senior staff tried to shut that kind of talk down, but Lovett could feel, sometimes, that part of what kept everyone going was the certainty of the ink on his shoulder blade. Every long night, every time someone on senior staff yelled at him, every screw-up—he could think about the tattoo, and take a deep breath, and relax.

 _Some kind of funhouse-mirror fortune-telling nonsense,_ he emailed his mom in late 2008, after he’d been offered the speechwriting job in Barack Obama’s White House. _Were any of your tattoos this cursed?_

His mom calls instead of emailing him back. “Darling,” she starts, which is rarely a good sign.

He cuts her off. “I’m fine, Mom. I don’t need to be soothed or anything. I’m happy! I have a job in the White House! It’s all good.”

“It’s not your fault,” she says, as though he hadn’t interrupted at all. “The country elected him. You didn’t do any of this.”

“That’s not what Sam from Comms said.” Lovett shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t be bitter about it, except that he knows Sam’s not the only one. Half the campaign staff is probably going to hate him when they find out what his tattoo really meant.

He’d thought Sam was a pretty good friend, is the thing. Whatever—he’ll make new friends in DC. Famously friendly city, DC. Not at all stuffed with soulless bureaucrats and power-hungry douchebags who’d stab anyone in the back for access to the President. He sighs, unfortunately loud enough for his mom to hear it.

“Jonathan,” she says, “you don’t have to take this job. Just because it’s a big deal doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for you.”

“I think my tattoo already knows I’m gonna take this job, so there’s no point worrying about it,” Lovett says. “No, no, it’s fine, it’s gonna be great,” he adds, talking over her attempts to console him again. “Seriously. It’s the White House, Mom. It’s where I was supposed to be headed, before. I just got there a weird way.”

“Okay, honey. But you call me again if you need to talk, okay?”

“Yeah. Say hi to Dad for me. Gotta go. Love you.”

***

Lovett knows it’s time to leave when his nominal boyfriend comes up behind him in the bathroom and says, “Didn’t you used to have a tattoo of the White House right here?”

Lovett’s brushing his teeth, so it takes him a moment to rinse, and by then he’s already accepted it. This isn’t the thing: this is the stepping stone to the thing. Fine. “I’m moving to LA,” he says, and rinses out his brush.

“Uh—since when?” Geoff sets down his own toothbrush, carelessly, so the toothpaste he’d just put on it smears the countertop. It’s Geoff’s place to mess up, but—ew.

Since forty seconds ago, Lovett doesn’t say. “I’ve been thinking about it for a while. Listen—”

“Don’t say ‘listen.’ No one says ‘listen’ before good news. Jon, this is good, you and me. Isn’t it?”

Lovett doesn’t answer that fast enough. He knows he doesn’t. He takes the beat, then says, “You’re great. You’ll be on to someone better than me in, like, ten seconds. You could get on Grindr right now and—”

“ _Jesus_ , Jon. Don’t—is that what you think? So much for you being a real relationship guy, ‘oh, I don’t use the apps, don’t you think we should really have a big community conversation about the way gay men have this separation between romance and sex’—” He bites off the imitation of Lovett’s voice, which is, in Lovett’s opinion, unnecessarily nasal. “Just go. You’re obviously chomping at the fucking bit to get out of here.”

Lovett wasn’t, five minutes ago. “Sorry,” he says, and means it. Mostly means it. Geoff had been good. Geoff just hadn’t been … permanent.

Maybe nothing is ever going to be permanent, for Lovett. He hopes he’s wrong about that.

***

Los Angeles is everything Lovett never knew he wanted. He’s leaving behind more friends than he ever thought he’d make in the White House, but it’s 2011; they’ve got WhatsApp. He’ll probably stay in touch with at least a few. Emily and Jon, for sure.

Jon’s not one he’d have expected to want to hang on to, viewed from the outside; they don’t have much in common besides politics. But they get on like gangbusters anyway, and now that Jon’s found Emily, Lovett gets the package deal. Emily’s become Lovett’s new favorite person in a matter of months, and Lovett’s certain she’ll be as good by text and email as she is on their long Stupid Sundays together, brunch and massages and dinner and a movie and wine, Jon tagging along sometimes.

He can’t do Stupid Sundays with Emily from across the country, but now he’s got sun and palm trees and a whole house to himself, and, somehow, incredibly, a TV show. The first script he’s ever written in his life got filmed, got picked up, and he’s got a TV show. The tattoo fucking led him right, this time. Maybe the timing was—other than ideal—but his tattoos come through in the end.

He hasn’t actually gotten a new one yet, but he’s been daydreaming about what’s coming. An Emmy, maybe, in bright pseudo-gold on his new and improved chest. (Gyms in LA, it turns out, are a whole other beast compared to gyms in DC.) Okay, maybe not an Emmy, but something. The NBC logo; an idea for his next season; a director’s chair. He’d look really fucking good with a director’s chair on one arm, he thinks. By this time next year, he might have a minute to breathe again—shows have hiatuses, after all—and he bets a director’s chair on his bicep would help him pick up in WeHo.

He doesn’t have much time to daydream, really, but he still manages to squeeze it in. He’s just waiting for all of this to be confirmed, for that sign. For something that says this is it, that he chose right.

In the meantime, he gets back to work. His first time writing TV; his first time doing a show; his first time directing; firsts on firsts on firsts. He doesn’t sleep for six months.

In the end, he doesn’t get another tattoo until the cancellation comes through. It isn’t as much of a fuck-you as it might have been, he supposes. He’d been so tired, so ready to be told to stop, that the cancellation almost felt like a blessing. The tattoo feels like that: bittersweet, complicated. It just says **_writer_**.

He doesn’t write for almost a year, after that. He’s done listening to his fucking tattoos.

***

“I’m going to get one,” Lovett says, cuddling Jon and Emily’s new puppy to his face. “I can’t believe I don’t already have one. What am I even doing with my life?”

“That’s the question,” Jon says. It’s sardonic; it hurts. Lovett knows Jon just meant it as a joke, but Emily catches the soft wince, and Lovett looks away as she tries to signal Jon to shut up. He presses Leo’s soft puppy belly to his face and breathes in the soft puppy scent. Jon’s not wrong; Lovett’s been floundering, lately. He’s got the money to flounder for a while—TV’s good like that—but it’s harder to pretend it’s fine when someone else says all the things he’s been telling himself. Much harder, when it’s Jon and Emily who know he’s lost.

“You’re doing great,” Emily says. “You’re producing. You’re a producer. That’s cool. That’s, like, so Hollywood cool.”

Lovett shakes his head. Leo’s getting restless now, and Lovett puts him down, watches him run around looking for his ball. “It’s fine,” he says. “It’s not—all-encompassing.”

“You can take a bigger role at Fenway, if you want,” Jon offers. “Mitchell loved that speech you wrote him. I’d happily farm out more of the speechwriting side to you.”

Lovett doesn’t know. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.” At his feet, Leo’s found the ball and is pushing it into Lovett’s ankle, whining. Lovett leans down and throws it for him, gently, across the living room. “This is really a home now, huh? With a puppy and everything.”

“Anywhere’s a home where Jon Lovett walks in whenever he wants,” Emily says, grinning. “Makes a place homey, you bursting in with Starbucks.”

“You should burst in on _me_ with Starbucks more,” Lovett says. “We need some Starbucks parity.”

Jon throws the ball for Leo, who’s brought it back and is whining again. “How many meals did you eat here this week, Lovett?”

“I plead the fifth,” Lovett says. Too many, he supposes. It’s better here than Lovett’s house, where his desk stares at him, accusingly. “I’m going to get one of these,” he says again, reaching down to scoop up Leo and his ball together. “We’ll go on walks together. He’ll keep me company.”

“We’ll keep you company,” Emily says, smiling. Lovett hands Leo to her, and she giggles as he licks her chin. Lovett can’t believe, sometimes, that his favorite people moved all the way out here, moved in across the fucking street, people he thought he’d been leaving behind in DC. “Won’t we, Leo?”

Leo licks her again; she giggles again. Jon kisses the side of her head, eyes on the puppy. Yeah—Lovett needs a puppy. That’s the part of the scene he’s envying. If he says it enough, he’ll believe it.

***

“… and frankly, if McConnell wasn’t busy perfecting his turtle impression, complete with sticking his head out from his shell when you poke him in the asshole—"

Jon laughs, leaning back in his chair, throat exposed. “Lovett, you can’t say that.”

“Leave it in!” Lovett shouts, loud enough that the producer winces. “Sorry, sorry.” Pundit barks, as if to double down on his being the most annoying guest Jon could have invited. “Just—keep rolling. Whatever.”

Jon pulls the headphones off his ears, waves at the sound booth. “You’re ridiculous,” he says. He’s grinning. “Listen—come over tonight? Emily misses you.”

“Emily saw me literally yesterday,” Lovett informs him. They’d had breakfast together, overnight oats on the back patio. Emily’s on an oats kick lately. As long as she puts maple syrup and bananas in his, Lovett’s not complaining. “If she misses me, you should take her to get checked by a doctor. Maybe a neurologist.”

“I can hear you,” the producer pipes up. “Literally everything you’re saying. Just, you know, FYI.”

Lovett ignores him. “But, I mean, fine. I wouldn’t want to deprive your girlfriend of my presence. She’s stuck with her boring, taciturn, verveless—”

“Okay, hey now,” Jon says, grinning at him. Pundit comes up and sniffs at Jon’s knee, and Jon lifts her up onto his lap and pets her. “I’m expecting to be there, too, you know.”

“I’ll put up with you if Emily and Leo are there,” Lovett tells him, airily. “Anyway, you can bring us drinks.”

Jon laughs, putting his headphones back on. “That’s me. Presidential speechwriter, coffee boy. Sorry, Pat, we’re good to go. I’ll try to keep him on topic.”

After they wrap, Jon drives them back from the studio, chattering about the latest from the DC crew. Lovett knows most of it already—they’re all in the same giant WhatsApp group—but it’s enjoyable, anyway, to hear Jon’s happiness about everyone’s engagements, new homes, new projects. Jon’s soothing like this, when both dogs are on Lovett’s lap and he knows there’s a long, pleasant evening ahead.

Emily ushers them in with Leo tucked under one arm. She’s already in casual hangout gear, thin sweats and a thinner tank top. “Athleisure,” Lovett pronounces, and Emily giggles.

“I think this is just leisure,” she says. “You want a beer? Or we’ve got bitters and stuff, you want a Manhattan?”

“Jon, your girlfriend is trying to get me drunk,” Lovett announces, and then, “Sure, sounds good.”

These nights always seem to end up with him and Emily cuddled up in the corner of the sofa, sometimes Jon on Emily’s other side where Lovett’s fingers brush him accidentally. Mostly accidentally.

It goes like that tonight, until Emily’s whisky-scented giggles are pressed into Lovett’s neck, her hand splayed across his ribs. Jon’s slid down the couch enough that he’s half lying down, his head tucked under Emily’s arm, cheek on her belly.

Lovett’s not looking too closely at anybody’s motivations; that was an easy, early call when they moved in across the street from him. Their nights together, their too-close friendship is _something_ ; it can keep being something, if none of them get weird about it. He feels easier in their house than his own, and he doesn’t want that to go away.

Jon looks up at him, unfocused, through those stupidly beautiful lashes. “It’s weird that you live across the straight from us. The street from us.” He blinks, smiles. He looks guileless. He often looks guileless, but Lovett knows it’s an illusion.

It doesn’t make it less compelling, though, or make Lovett’s chest feel any less tight when Jon says, thickly, “Not really across the straight. More of a, a—what’s the thing, Em?”

“A spectrum,” she says, firmly. Her breath is warm on Lovett’s throat. The answer came to her so fast, and Lovett doesn’t know if that’s the connection between her and Jon from their years together or if it’s something they’ve talked about.

Lovett doesn’t speak. If Jon’s trying to say something, Lovett isn’t going to forestall it with a quip. Not tonight, with whisky and vermouth and bitters swirling in his veins, with Emily’s hair tickling his chin.

“I don’t think we’re as far across the spectrum as you think,” Jon says, soft. “Just … across the street, maybe.”

Lovett wonders if Emily can feel the sudden racing of his heart from where she’s sprawled half across his chest. “I would have said across the country,” Lovett tries. He’s a little too drunk for metaphor, but he’s willing to try, for this. For whatever’s happening right now.

The moment hangs, silent and still, and then Emily says, “You’d cross the street for us, right?” and Lovett knows exactly what he’s agreeing to when he nods his head, breath shuddering into him.

***

Lovett wakes up disoriented; the light is on the wrong side, the smells aren’t quite right. He blinks up to consciousness and last night floods back to him just before he clocks that he’s alone in the bed.

There’s a post-it note on his phone, though, when he fumbles for it on the nightstand. _Gone for a run. We love you._

 _Love_ —he’d heard that last night, too. He’d said it. Today, in the morning light, stomach roiling a little from not enough water with his whisky, he feels it twice as much. It’s not anything he’d ever expected; it’s exactly right.

A small, rebellious part of him is glad this is nothing that’s been foretold, that this is something he chose all on his own. Jon and Emily came to him, to Los Angeles, and they decided this, not some misleading tattoo. He’s never had a good one since that long-faded **_gay._**

They’re in the kitchen by the time he makes his way downstairs, wrapped up in one of Emily’s cushy parachute robes. They don’t see him immediately, and he pauses in the doorway, watching them, moving around each other easily in their athletic wear, smiling, touching casually. Easy together; easy in this kitchen they share.

Lovett, a few years ago, would have felt the anxious rumble of his stomach, watching them, and distanced himself before they could realize he doesn’t fit into that picture, into that kitchen.

Lovett, today, is going to fucking fight for what he wants.

“You all look much too awake for this time of the morning,” Lovett says, pushing into their space, jostling Jon aside with his hip to reach the coffee. “It’s appalling.”

There isn’t even a pause. He’d known—he’d hoped—he’d _known_ there wouldn’t be. There’s an arm on his waist and lips on the nape of his neck, and a mug pressed into his hand, and Lovett takes a deep, contented breath. “Sleep well?” Jon asks. He sounds more nervous than Lovett feels, which is backwards and strange and perfect.

“If I say I slept terribly, what are you gonna do?” Lovett asks, sipping his coffee. “Buy a new mattress, or kick me out of bed?”

“Buy a new mattress,” Jon says, firmly. He says it like there’s no question at all, and that certainty, despite Jon’s obvious morning-after awkwardness, answers the full breadth of what Lovett had needed to know. “Although I’ve seen your mattress, so if you’re complaining about ours, I think this might be Stockholm Syndrome or something. You’ve adjusted to being held hostage to the world’s worst mattress.”

Lovett thinks about defending his mattress, and doesn’t. “Did you take Pundit out?”

“She came with us to run,” Emily says. “She’s got pretty good stamina, actually.”

“Because we run! I’m a runner! I just don’t run before dawn like I’m in a Nike commercial like some people—”

Emily tucks her face into his shoulder, arms wrapped around him. “Maybe we’ll sway you. You don’t have to run alone if you don’t want to, anymore.” The end of it goes up just slightly, like a question.

“Maybe I like this thing where I wake up to sweaty, attractive people in the kitchen making me coffee,” Lovett counters, and Emily squeezes him tighter.

Jon steps up in front of him, sliding between him and the counter. “Kind of nice having you in the kitchen in my bathrobe,” he says. He still sounds nervous, but he moves easily to kiss Lovett.

“It’s Emily’s,” Lovett doesn’t say. “I have coffee breath,” he doesn’t add. He’s busy just being here, just letting Jon kiss him, morning-slow, with Emily still plastered against his back. Jon’s hand moves up to Lovett’s hair, stroking into it, holding Lovett close, and Lovett reaches past him and manages to set the mug down, upright, on the counter.

Emily says, “We should probably have breakfast first. You know, keep our strength up.”

Jon laughs, leans back far enough to look at Lovett. “You want eggs? We can do eggs.”

 _I want you_ , Lovett thinks. “I want you,” he says. Brutal honesty feels strangely easy, the way it always has with them. He finds one of Emily’s hands and squeezes it, fingers threaded between hers. “But yeah, eggs sounds good.”

Jon and Emily have double curtains in the bedroom, blackout curtains with a sheer inner set, like a hotel room. Emily’s good at life, in those kinds of ways. Soft towels, pretty paper lining the drawers. The ability to have sex at ten in the morning with the sun streaming in through sheer curtains to glow on bare, damp skin.

Lovett can see them, now, the way he couldn’t last night. He can see their tattoos. Emily’s shown him all of hers, the ones that never seem to go away like his so often do: the Leo tag and collar, the Rosie the Riveter with Taylor Swift’s face, the crossed palm trees. Except, this morning, there are three palm trees, not two.

He runs his fingers over the new one, slotted in perfectly among them, their crowning leaves intermingled. Emily shivers under his touch. “When—?” He can’t quite finish the question.

“Around when you got Pundit,” Jon answers for her. “Around when I got—” He shoves out of his boxers, so Lovett can see the side of his hip. There’s one there Lovett’s never seen; both dogs, curled up in one bed, Leo’s distinctive face tucked up next to Pundit’s. The background is sketched out, just quick lines: Jon and Emily’s entryway, with three sets of keys on the key hooks. One set has Lovett’s Squirtle bottle-opener, tiny but impossible to mistake.

“Subtle,” Lovett says, moving his fingers over it. He swallows. “I got Pundit in March.”

He looks up in time to see Jon and Emily exchanging glances. “We weren’t sure—what it meant, exactly,” Emily says. “We knew what we wanted it to mean, but we didn’t want to be just … interpreting it through the wrong lens.”

“How many lenses can you put on—okay, Jon’s, maybe, but both of them, that’s—”

Jon shrugs. “Could be platonic. You’re—I mean. Emily’s—”

“A woman,” Emily inserts, drily. “We kind of thought that would pose some issues.”

It does, and it doesn’t. Emily lets him pass the reins back to Jon, when he reaches the limit of what he can do. If it weren’t Emily, he couldn’t do any of this, but for her—well. They’re intertwined palm trees. It works.

He looks down, at his own body. There’s just **_writer_** left, still taunting him. “Does it bother you that I don’t—”

“No,” Emily says, too fast, before Jon can answer. Lovett swallows, and moves to distract all three of them.

***

It takes him six days of fretting, and then twenty minutes of aimless driving, before he realizes what he’s going to do.

There are places you can get a false tattoo; it’s one of those things everyone’s heard about, but which almost no one would ever admit to doing. A rock star, maybe, chasing fading fame with shocking behavior; people on the fringe of society. Anna Nicole Smith, supposedly, with her elderly husband’s name in a love heart that convinced him to marry her.

There aren’t many such places, but this is Los Angeles: there have to be a few.

He finds a Starbucks for coffee and a breakfast sandwich, and searches from his car, feeling furtive. The shops aren’t hiding, exactly; they advertise their services as decorative art, not as opportunities to mislead. The advertised pictures are bland, if beautiful: landscapes, flowers, stars and moons. Certainly not any of the false tattoos of the various pretender Anastasias, or the people who believe they’re the Queen of England, with her famous lion rampant.

Lovett takes a deep breath, finds one that’s on this side of the 405, and turns on his GPS.

***

“Okay,” the burly gentleman at the false-tattoo shop says slowly, acceptingly. “Do you have a design in mind?”

Lovett shakes his head. “Something—something about streets, I think. A map? Or—” He shrugs. “Sorry. I’ve never, uh. Thought about doing this.”

“Most people haven’t,” the guy says. Based on the name of the shop, Lovett’s almost but not completely sure that his name is Barry.

Maybe-Barry has more tattoos than Lovett’s ever seen on anyone outside of the occasional 60 Minutes piece about compulsive liars. Lovett carefully doesn’t look at any of them, although he can’t miss the large spider across Barry’s throat. Lovett doesn’t know what that’s supposed to mean; it doesn’t seem like a lie worth telling.

“It’s not—a lie,” he says, because the idea of it is making his stomach roil. “It’s something real, it just hasn’t … I don’t want to wait and hope that I’ll get one, someday. It’s real already, to me. To—them.”

“Okay,” Barry says. He probably hears that a lot, Lovett realizes suddenly. People who think they’re the Queen of England don’t come in saying they want to ink a lie into their skin.

Lovett knows there’s no point trying to make Barry understand, but he tries again, anyway. “It’s—mine always disappear. I’ve had lots, but they never stay. And this is—for me, this is permanent. I want this to be permanent. And I’ve heard that the—” He catches himself before he says _false tattoos_ “—the, uh, ink ones are forever.”

Barry tilts his hand back and forth. “They fade—colors, especially. Black’s for life, usually. And, uh. When you die, people will know it was a fake all along. It won’t disappear like the real ones.” He sounds like he’s given variations of this speech before, hundreds of times. Lovett didn’t think someone in this line of work would be trying to talk anyone out of buying his services.

“I don’t care,” Lovett says. His wallet’s sitting on the counter between them.

Barry shrugs and pulls out a binder of images, and a sketchpad. “Streets, maybe a map,” he says. “You want to give me anything else? What’s it about?”

“I’m—my—partners,” Lovett says, trying the word out on his tongue. “They’ve got—she’s got these three palm trees, and he’s got our dogs in a basket and our keys on hooks, it’s—they’re visual, I guess. I usually get words. Not always—mostly, mostly I get words.”

“Me too,” Barry says. “My soul’s not as visual as I am.”

Lovett wasn’t raised to conceptualize tattoos that way, but he’s not in the mood to talk about it. Barry isn’t pushing, anyway; he’s sketching. “Names?”

“Uh—”

“Or symbols, but you gotta give me something to work with,” Barry says, a little impatient now. “Unless you want a generic map with, I don’t know, three houses on it.”

“That’s kind of the opposite of the idea,” Lovett says. “One house, three cars?”

Barry shakes his head. “How environmentally friendly of you. C’mon. Give me something. Streets have street signs. Street signs have names. Your name avenue crossing at her name drive crossing at his name street? Something.”

Lovett can kind of see that, actually. One of those complicated intersections you see in Europe, in lower Manhattan, in DC. “That could—the meeting of three roads,” he says. “I can see that.” He can visualize it, the bright green of a street sign. Of three street signs. “Uh—Lovett, is one.” He spells it. “And Black, and the last one’s Favreau.”

“Like the director,” Barry says, and then, “Is it the director?”

“ _No_.”

“That’s what you’d say if it was,” Barry points out, but he touches his finger to his nose, signals it’s a joke. “Okay. Gimme a minute.”

Barry sketches fast, shows Lovett the idea, signs angled like three roads are all meeting in one spot: **_LOVETT ST_** and **_BLACK CRES_** and **_FAVREAU DR_**.

“Maybe—drop the street designations,” Lovett says, and Barry shrugs, scratches them out. “Yeah. That’s—yeah.”

“I’ll work it up digital and print it,” Barry says. “I’ll need twenty minutes. Full color, or just the outlines? Where’s it going? How big?”

Full color, Lovett tells him. Not huge, but big enough to read. And, embarrassed but certain, “Over—over my heart.”

“It’s gonna hurt,” Barry advises him. “Especially with all that filling. I can do it in one session at this size, but it’s gonna feel like I hit you with a spiked bat, no matter how gentle I try to be. You get me?”

“It’s important,” Lovett tells him.

Barry shrugs. “Okay. Deposit’s $600. I’m estimating $1200 for the whole thing, but that’s not a quote and I’m not holding to it, you get me? It depends how fast it goes, how many breaks you call, how—”

“You take Mastercard?”

Barry shakes his head, smiling now. “Well, no one can say I didn’t try. Yeah. I take Mastercard. I hope you don’t have to be anywhere for a few hours.”

***

The afternoon is waning when Lovett gets back. He can’t wear his shoulder belt; it hurts like a fire across his left side. It’s almost the same spot as **_failure_** had been, he’d realized early on, trying to think of anything else while he endured the torture of the scraping needles. This is—if he’s wrong about this, about all of this, it’s going to be like having **_failure_** on him for the rest of his life.

Barry asked him, at some point, whether he was really sure that the other two were in it for good. It was a little late to ask, in Lovett’s opinion; they’d been an hour into the session. But he knew the answer, anyway. Whatever Barry might think of the risks, Lovett knows Jon and Emily better than he knows anyone. Jon commits like it’s an Olympic sport; Emily is like another piece of Lovett’s heart. They wouldn’t have asked him to cross the metaphorical street for anything less than forever.

Pundit’s loud when he gets in, exuberant to see him. Jon and Emily are closer to annoyed: “Where’d you go? I’ve been texting you all day,” Jon says.

“Kind of thought you were dead,” Emily adds, not entirely a joke. “Um. Sudden podcast emergency?”

He shakes his head. “If I said I went out to buy three rings, would you—would that be completely ridiculous?”

Jon swallows, next to her. “No. Did you?”

“Kind of,” Lovett says. He’d asked, while he paid the final bill, whether he could undo the gauze, “Just once. To show—just once.” Barry had smiled at him, said, “Once. Nobody touches.”

He can’t peel out of his own shirt, the way his whole left side feels, but he can reach over with his right hand and lift it. Emily gasps. “What—are you okay?”

“It’s a—” Now that it’s time to explain, the words stick in his throat. He lets his shirt drop again, says, “You know I have the worst tattoos in the world.” They know; they’ve heard about all of it. The closet door, the White House. **_Failure_**. **_Writer._**

Jon gets it before Emily does, says, “Lovett, you _didn’t_. Tell me you didn’t get a, a fake.” His voice trembles over the word. It would, from Jon. Jon, who treasures the truth.

Lovett swallows. “Just listen?” Pundit’s still pressed against his leg; he reaches down and picks her up one-handed, flinches from the pain of bending. “Mine have never been like they’re supposed to be. Maybe the first one, but it’s just been this parade of mistakes and confusion and—” He shakes his head. “The only thing that’s ever worked for me is making my own choices. You know? A tattoo didn’t tell me to try stand-up, or to get into politics, or to move to LA. The real stuff, the good stuff, it doesn’t show up for me, the way it shows up for you. And this is, uh. This is real. And good.”

Jon nods, slowly, not agreeing but listening. Emily steps toward Lovett and takes Pundit from him, staying close enough that Lovett can rub his fingers in her soft fur.

“So I just—I made it happen, because that’s what matters, really. The, the choosing. I’m _choosing_ this. You. I’m not going to move on, so—so I went and made it forever. Because it’s not up to the fucking tattoos, okay? It’s up to us. I’ve always had the fucking monkey’s paw of tattoos, and I’m just—I’m not putting up with it anymore. That’s all. I’m—” His own voice cracks. He needs them to say something now, just as much as he needed them, right until this moment, to shut up and let him talk.

Jon says, “Can we see?”

Emily helps him lift his shirt again, and peel back the surgical tape along one corner and then another, until they can fold back the gauze and see it. “Not as, uh. Not very impressive with the swelling and blood and everything in the way,” Lovett says, trying to make it a joke, but suddenly too aware how fake it looks, how obvious a lie it must seem. If they don’t believe him, if they think it’s too taboo-breaching to handle, there’s nothing he can do to take it back.

“Jesus, Lovett,” Jon says. His eyes are shiny, and he reaches up to rub them. “This _hurt_ you.”

It aches; it stiffens his whole left side with remembered pain. Lovett doesn’t even feel it, watching them look. “I don’t care.”

“We care,” Emily says. “You—fucking hell, Lovett. Rings would have been more than enough, you know.”

He lets out a bark of a laugh, startled, feeling relief start to spread through him. “I mean, we can do that too. If Jon’s still—uh, if this hasn’t—changed things.”

Jon steps forward, closer. He pushes the gauze closed again, smooths down the surgical tape. He presses his hand, so gently it doesn’t hurt, across the whole tattoo. “I choose you back, Lovett. This isn’t exactly how I would have, uh—but I get it.”

“His way is definitely rings,” Emily says. “And Starbucks. And flowers.”

“Flowers for you,” Jon says, unembarrassed. “Probably something different for Lovett.”

“I accept cash and blowjobs,” Lovett says, letting his shirt drop over Jon’s hand. “If you’re taking suggestions.”

Emily laughs, and wraps her arms around his waist, staying well clear of the tattoo. Her skin is warm where Jon’s hand is pinning his shirt up. “Do you have to do anything? To the—uh, to heal it?”

Lovett’s got an information sheet in his back pocket, but he remembers the basics. “Ointment twice a day, starting tomorrow afternoon,” he says.

“I’ll help you,” Emily tells him.

Jon says, “I’ll provide moral support.” Jon’s not the best with the idea of his people in pain.

Lovett’s ready to move on to the less-sappy part of the day, to dinner and maybe some soft, celebratory sex. “I think I can handle it, guys,” he says, and then, “I should have picked up food on my way back. I’ll order something. Pizza? Chinese? Anything you guys want.”

Emily squeezes his waist, Pundit’s head lolling on his shoulder. “Yeah,” Jon says, voice thick with emotion. “Sounds good.”

***

Emily finds a white and yellow striped tattoo on Lovett’s back waist, two weeks before the election. They don’t find out what it means until Crooked Media is already in full swing.

Lovett goes to Barry and gets it inked over, to stay forever. Whatever happens next, Lovett’s keeping it all with him.  
  



End file.
